From the perspective of historical facts, the Battle of Waterloo only captures fragments of the magnificent lives of great men, but Bondarchuk obviously made up his mind from the very beginning--since the whole picture cannot be swayed arbitrarily, then the winners and losers will be selected. Moment. Napoleon's sudden fortune and soaring rise is certainly a bright spot in his life, but on the big screen it is likely to turn into a monolithic grand narrative. From the perspective of looking for dramatic conflict, the hero is late, like the prodigal son and prostitute Congliang, they are all old tricks that can be met but not sought after, tried and tested.
In the opening shot of Bondarchuk, Napoleon in 1814 was an unattractive or even sullen French emperor who had just suffered a fiasco at the Battle of Leipzig. abdicate. Here, Rod Steiger's acting skills are detached, and he brings out the state of a great man who is exhausted, unwilling, angry and even swearing because of failure. In the most impressive scene, facing the low but tough attitude of the ministers, Napoleon was furious and roared loudly, "I will never, never, never abdicate!" , but it is the bluff behind the toughness that is more accurate.
It can be said that Bondarchuk's focus from beginning to end is the post-peak state of the big man's "tiger defeating the hero". Halfway through the story, Napoleon, who escaped from Elba Island, encountered the Bourbon dynasty's troops who killed him. With only 700 elite soldiers, he spoke impassively in front of the muskets from the soldiers of the past: "You really are. Do you want to treat your emperor like this?" After a stalemate for a few seconds, the soldiers on the opposite side went from pretending to be calm to shivering, from weak legs to falling to the ground, and then lined up around the emperor. Napoleon was very happy when his old party defected, but he also knew very well in his heart: the soldiers at the bottom could not solve any substantive problems, and the emerging bourgeoisie, who started to struggle with him in the great revolution, had completely abandoned him for their own selfish interests. .
Napoleon, who returned to Paris, apparently regained lost ground and re-established the so-called "Hundred Days Dynasty", but he was all too clear about the scheming of the court officials. Only the former general, Ney, understood the thoughts of the commander. After all, he was a real soldier, and he knew that the love of ordinary soldiers was far from the support of the entire class; he was the only one who understood that Napoleon wanted to "return" for this final battle. "What price to pay... Throughout the film, such heroic twilight scenes can be seen everywhere, not only Napoleon's own strengths but also the well-knowing of his comrades-in-arms. As a result, this battle of fate, known both at home and abroad, got rid of the vulgar pattern of winning and losing in the camera, and was artistically reduced to a contest with no winners.
Of course, this is also an interesting film, but unlike the usual "film history masterpiece", its interest extends far beyond the screen from the text of the film. According to director Sergei Bondarchuk, the extras who played the soldiers in the war were especially pitiful. During filming on the nearly semi-closed set, they not only had to resist the itch to their bones, but also endured the sexual thirst from the Soviet KGB. Spying... But the biggest embarrassment didn't surface until the movie was released: audiences wondered why Napoleon's biopic was made by a Soviet director and flopped at the box office. Waterloo became "Waterloo", and "Napoleon" became a "theme black hole" in film history that "can only be seen from a distance, not to be played with".
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